Hurricane Isaac
 

Looks like poor Haiti is about to be slammed. The storm is making a beeline for Port-au-Prince. Current projection show it hitting Cuba over the weekend, and then moving up the gulf coast side of Florida early next week.

Hurricane Tracker - weather.com

The big story is if they have to cancel the republican convention. Any word on if there is a contingency plan?

we all taunt W said its just rain....?

I read somewhere that it'd just go to Charlotte before the Dems, since the Secret Service etc. already have plans in place for there.

AT worst they'll have problems Monday and maybe early Tuesday, but I don't see any way they would move the convention. The whole thing is a TV show and they've already built the studio. They can't just recreate that in a couple of days.

Hoping it hits Houston, so UCLA can end their dreadful run since the last hurricane that messed up their season

thanks for posting this... might have forgotten to remind my minions to be prepared to respond this weekend

I might be at that game. All depends on when I have to visit one of my customers in Houston.

It just might head that way, but not in time to affect the Thursday night game.

Damn.... If it goes to the far east of thsoe that's my sisters house. The center is NOLA and no one wants that... the west is my house.

Just got settled into our new house after a tree crushed my old one back in March... no trees around here, just not sure how the roads do with water on this side of town.

It looks like Jim Cantore will be heading towards New Orleans.

Sucks to be them. He's like a modern day Angel of Death.

SI

Is it just me, or has he been working out with Ed Hochuli?

Crap, going to Baton Rouge on Tuesday...

Hm. Looking at the forecast as they have it, the models are still pretty scattered, but it's been a pretty steady westward march. A couple of worries: they don't have this storm being much more than a low 2 by landfall, but the central Gulf really hasn't been tapped much this season, so there's always a chance that conditions and water temps could line up right and cause the bottom to fall out (remember, Wilma in '05 went from TS to Cat 5 in an incredibly short amount of time). Putting that concern aside, the other is that I see the forecast track is for the storm to slow down as it comes to the coast to about half the speed it's making right now. If true, this is bad for NOLA because of rain more than anything. Also, being forecast to the west of landfall means that spillover from Ponchartrain is a consideration, as well. I think (and most definitely hope) that it won't be as bad as Katrina and that the city and its levees are better prepared, but it's not going to be a fun week ahead for the central Gulf regardless of where it ends up.

My wife may end up indirectly affected as she's heading to eastern Tennessee to visit family and this is the sort of storm that eventually inundates the Tennessee and Ohio valleys on its way through the eastern US.

New 11 PM advisory just put out. Still a TS and still forecast to be a low Cat 2 at landfall in about 48 hours. However, the forecast has been dragged west a bit more again. The landfall is now targeted roughly around the delta at the mouth of the Mississippi around 8 PM on Tuesday. Last forecast had landfall (technically) somewhere around the Chandeleur Islands (and true landfall somewhere between Biloxi and the Lousiana state line in Mississippi). This is a more negative forecast for New Orleans as the track still keeps slightly to the east of the city, but much closer now. More wind damage in addition to water damage.

Comparing with prior forecasts, it looks like they seem to be confident about the speed since the forecast has been calling for a landfall at roughly the same time (late Tuesday into early Wednesday). It's just that they can't get any of their models to come to a conclusive agreement about where. Only 24 hours ago, they were forecasting a hard right and a due-north push in around the Fort Walton Beach area, so they've moved that forecast westward by about 200 miles in one day. Move it another 200 miles by the end of tomorrow and that puts the forecast around Lake Charles. However, with the timing of landfall now falling into the short-term forecast realm, I expect these adjustments to get smaller. This may ultimately settle into a landfall spot somewhere near Houma or the mouth of the Atchafalaya. It may still re-curve toward Mobile or Gulfport/Biloxi, but the continual adjustments west I think make those a bit less likely.

Pouring rain in central Florida - just had a tornado warning cancelled here 15 minutes ago.

From a NO friend.

I'm not even sure I got enough water to turn my sprinklers off on Wednesday.

Here's a page with an aggregation of just about every hurricane info source that is out there .

http://www.tropicwx.com/

So what's with the wacky pile of clouds going off to the NE from Isaac?

EDIT: I mean that whole stream halfway across the Atlantic



SI

If that sucker goes the right way, we won't be complaining about a lack of moisture in our area much longer. Unfortunately, it's coming way too late.

11 PM advisory is out. Isaac continues to kind of take its time about whether it wants to be a true hurricane or not (been dragged down by some dry air getting sucked into the system), but NHC is expecting that to happen sometime overnight at this point. The numbers have been trending down in intensity since yesterday, though, likely because the window until landfall is closing before Isaac can really get itself together. NHC admits their projections for intensity are a little higher than most of the models and at this point, it's not projected much more than a high Cat 1 at landfall. Still going to be rough business for southeast Louisiana, but nothing that could be considered catastrophic at this point.

The forecast track has pretty much been held to about the same line for a day now, with landfall right about the mouth of the Mississippi and then an inland track that takes it very close to New Orleans. The track has actually shifted slightly back to the east towards New Orleans from what I see after having spent the past couple of days being east of New Orleans and then west of it. At least if it stays a little west, the push of water will come from the river side rather than being driven in from the ocean and lake side which has a lot more water to work with.

Same in Tampa. Much more water after this thing passed than before or during it.

I hope it does minimal damage, of course, but for purely selfish reasons, I hope it either drifts way west or takes a sharp right turn after landfall. We've got a softball tournament in Indianapolis this weekend, and I don't feel like wasting the weekend watching it rain while I pay for a hotel room and boarding our animals.

Not to minimize a potentially dangerous situation, but for the past 2-3 days, all we've heard on the news is that Isaac is "strengthening", and yet it's still below hurricane status. Gee, think the news has a vested interest in this?

To a point, yes, but Isaac's computer projections have gotten weaker and weaker, too. For all our technology, weather is still quite hard to predict.

SI

It's the liberal meteorologists trying to overshadow the GOP convention.

I think they're just desperate for a good hurricane. For most of the media, their understanding of the weather doesn't go much deeper than An Inconvenient Truth, which promised us an entire flotilla of category 20 hurricanes by now.

So the fact that a storm is heading toward New Orleans and might be a hurricane when it hits land is terribly exciting to them. I don't think the attention is malicious.

Anyway, that's not to minimize the danger. It still could pack a punch right at the coast, and that area is very flood-prone, so I hope people in the lowest areas are taking the warnings seriously. Other than that, as you in Florida know all too well, the biggest danger is the tornadoes that sometimes accompany these events.

The storm is moving very slowly. Levees are overtopped in Plaquemines. Uh oh. :(

CNN just talking to that Parish's government head-3 people rescued, more wind than predicted, one area that didn't flood with Katrina has five feet of water, water going over 8 foot levee, his own home damaged with hole in roof and water flooding in.

I thought you told me everything would be a-ok! ;)

(I'm mostly joking, I know that's not exactly what you were saying)

It was actually a bit breezy this morning in Houston, which is rarely is before the sun comes up

SI

Pretty strong wind (20+ mph) going non-stop now for the last hour a so all the way over here in Houston. Really amazing considering how far away the hurricane is.

SI

Media is reporting the levee's are holding up, but the are going to get even more water over the next 24 hours. Plus everyone thought New Orleans dodged a bullet immediately after Katrina hit, but we all know how that turned out.

I am not saying we are going to see widespreading flooding like Katrina (I think some of that was contributed by massive storm surge, something Issac is lacking), it just seems like the media has a short term memory issue. Of course, they were hyping this up as Katrina 2 earlier this week.

Yeah, evidently the storm is only advancing around 6-8 mph, so that means a lot of rain is getting dumped in a concentrated area. Not good at all.

There are reports that a dam is in danger of breaking on a lake near the Mississippi-Louisiana border. Gov. Jindal used a poor choice of words (or spot on) to describe the situation:


Evacuations ordered over possible dam break from Isaac – USATODAY.com